Effects of Temporal Locality of Ecological Processes on Coevolution of Learning and Niche Construction

Roles of ecological processes in evolution are attracting much attention in evolutionary studies. Learning and niche construction are regarded as ecological processes that can affect the course of evolution directly or indirectly. However, the effects of mutual interactions between them on evolution are still poorly understood. Our purpose is to provide insight into the coevolutionary dynamics of learning and niche construction. For this purpose, we constructed a simple individualbased model in which individuals can perform both a niche construction of their shared environmental factor and an acquisition of the adaptive phenotype through their lifetime learning. In particular, we focus on the effects of the temporal locality of ecological processes, which is the degree of simultaneous occurrence of ecological processes performed by individuals. We report that a cyclic coevolution of genes for learning and niche construction can occur when the temporal locality of ecological processes is low.